From ABC:
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News....

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects  whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed  down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic...

This is not just a smoking gun  it's a MOAB dropped right on the White House, confirming, yet again, what any sentient being should already know: the illegal torture tactics (yes, they are torture; and yes, they are illegal, no matter what "the Attorney General says") used on George W. Bush's Terror War captives were approved by the highest officials of the government, all of whom knew  in exacting, sickening detail  just what they were inflicting.

These cold-blooded atrocities were not restricted to "high value al Qaeda suspects"  the demure fiction that the ABC report, like most others in the mainstream media that have begun, gingerly, to delve into these crimes, still retains. As mountains of evidence has already shown, these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used throughout the Terror War prison system, from top to bottom:

On prisoners rounded up at random in mass raids in Iraq and Afghanistan

All of the atrocities and murders that have thus far come to light from the hellish pit of the Bush gulag are the direct responsibility of the "Principals," the inner circle, the Privy Council, the Star Chamber of the real American government: the "National Security State" that operates outside all law, all oversight, all constitutional legitimacy.

Yet even as the media digs out the workings of this junta, they feel compelled to offer what they believe is a fig leaf that will allow all good and decent folk to retain their sacred faith in American exceptionalism:

"Hey, we're not evil; we only torture the really bad guys, the worst of the worst, the high value al Qaeda scum.

"Torture's too good for the likes of them!"

And the sad fact is, the media mandarins are right.

American society has become so degenerate

American society has become so degenerate that the majority of people  and the entirety of the American Establishment  will now countenance torture, as long as they can convince themselves it is used only against "the bad guys."

At one time, the leaders of this nation condemned and punished the torture even of proven Nazis, on the principle that we must uphold our own humanity, and not descend to the brutish level of the most degraded among us.

But no more.

We are the degraded now.

Ruled by brutes

By deliberate torturers

Military aggressors

Mass murderers who walk the streets freely

Live in wealth and comfort

Receive public honors

Will never face justice

Never have to answer for their crimes against humanity.

If this were not so, these evil counsellors and their leader would already be subjected to the workings of the law:

The fact that they are not is yet another crime  a crime in which the entire political establishment is deeply complicit.

We'll say it again.

Anyone in public life who accords these criminals the slightest legitimacy is an accomplice to their crimes.

It's really that simple.

You can move toward the light

Or you can hang back with the brutes

US militarism

US Terror State

US War Crimes

Grandmother cries

US airstrike kills 3 injuring many

Baquba, Iraq

(left)

US militarism.

US Terror State.

Condoleezza Rice addresses the permanant council of the OSCE in Vienna.

No, you really cannot make this up.

One day after sparring with Russia over missile defence and Kosovo, Rice launched a new attack against its old and newly emerging cold war foe on Thursday for a slide in democracy  as if the US elections of 2000, 2002, 2004 were not managed, and 2006, except the overwhelming numbers against the party in power made it too difficult to fix completely.

Rice reproaches Spain in a visit on Friday, June 1, 2007 for its business contacts with Cuba, and said Spain should be killing more Afghanistan people as the United States is doing.

(right)

The grandmother of 11-year-old Mohammed Mahmoud Azzawi mourns behind the body of her grandson in a morgue in Baqouba, ( Baquba ), 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, on Saturday, June 2, 2007.

Mohammed Azzawi is one of 3 killed after a U.S airstrike this morning in the Al-mafraq district of central Baqouba, killing 3 people and injuring five.

The US air strike attacked their homes.

The people were in their houses.

Photos: AFP/Dieter Nagl, AP

US working urgently to impose more punitive measures against Tehran, the silly woman says

'We were waking in the morning and all of a sudden rockets landed in the house and the children were screaming,' a woman relative is quoted as saying.

'Most of those killed and wounded were women, children and elderly men which shows the indiscriminate monstrosity of the attacks on this crowded area,' Abdul-Mehdi al-Muteyri told Reuters news agency.

Photo: Uruknet

Refugees due to US and UK attack and occupation

(left)

Shia refugees due to the attack and occupation by the US and UK take a rest inside their tent in a refugee camp in the outskirts of Baghdad October 8, 2007.

(right)

The bullet riddled windscreen of a taxi in which two women were shot dead by private security guards in central Baghdad, 09 October 2007.

The foreign security guards belong to an Australian-run firm.

Photos: REUTERS/Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud

Robert Scheer: Rice More Sordid Than Foley

Posted on Oct 3, 2006

By Robert Scheer

They are such liars. On Monday, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, about the alarming potential for an Al Qaeda attack, as Bob Woodward has reported in his aptly named new book, “State of Denial.”

“I don’t remember a so-called emergency meeting,” Rice had said only hours earlier, apparently still suffering from some sort of post-9/11 amnesia that seemed to afflict her during her forced testimony to the 9/11 Commission.

The omission of this meeting from the final commission report is another example of how the Bush administration undermined the bipartisan investigation that the president had tried to prevent. Nor is it just Rice who should be challenged, for Tenet seems to have provided Woodward with details concerning the administration’s indifference to the terrorist threat that he did not share with the 9/11 Commission.

Said he needed to see her right away

In his book, Woodward described an encounter between Rice and Tenet, in a near panic about a rising flood of intelligence warnings just presented to him by top aide Cofer Black. Tenet forced an unscheduled meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, because he wanted the Bush administration to take action immediately against Al Qaeda to disrupt a possible domestic attack.

“Tenet ... decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away...”

“He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.”

A mountain of evidence proves that the Bush administration did nothing of the sort.

Not remembering confirms her inattention to terror reports

Now, if Rice truly does not remember that now-confirmed meetingwhich was apparently first reported in the Aug. 4, 2002, Time magazine in an article titled “Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?”  wouldn’t that indicate she didn’t take it that seriously?

Not remembering confirms her inattention to terror reports at a time the Bush administration was already fixated on “regime change” in Iraq.

Rice is famously sharp and has an awesome memory.

Considering the trauma of 9/11 and its effects, it is inconceivable that Rice would not recall such an ominous and prescient briefing by Tenet and Black, especially after the 9/11 Commission forced her to document and review her actions in those crucial months.

We were not presented with a plan

It is, however, as she stated Monday, “incomprehensible” that she, then the national security advisor to the president and the person most clearly charged with sounding the alarm, would have ignored the threat.

But ignore it the administration did, and then later tried to lay the blame on the Clinton administration, which, Rice claimed at the 9/11 Commission hearings, lied when it said it had given the incoming White House team an action plan for fighting Al Qaeda.

“We were not presented with a plan,” Rice infamously argued under questioning from former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), but instead were given a memo with “a series of actionable items” describing how to tackle Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Such weaseling would be funny if the topic were not so serious.

But there is no way Rice can squirm out of this one, despite her impressive track record of calculated distortion on everything from Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs to the trumped-up ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Can there be any better case for turning over control of at least one branch of Congress to the opposition party so that we might finally have hearings to learn the truth of this matter, which is far more important, and sordid, than the Foley affair?

It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime’s chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq.

Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator’s ties to Al Qaeda.

Rice’s demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger:

The fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s now famous exposé of the fraud.

And now the revelation that the President’s supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leakaltogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced.

Pivotal role

In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirelyor deliberately ignoredin both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, now-Secretary of State Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby.

For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush’s rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame’s identity.

None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity.

Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting.

"God's never failed me yet"

One summer weekend in 1998 at the family estate at Kennebunkport, Me., former president George H. W. Bush introduced his ambitious son George W. to a 43-year-old political science professor, Condoleezza Rice.

One of the rare African-American women in the field of Soviet studies, she was rarer still for her archly conservative views.

She had interrupted a teaching career at Stanford to work from 1989 until 1991 on the elder Bush's National Security Council staff as a specialist on Russian and East European affairs, and remained a vocal Bush loyalist.

George W. Bush was planning on running for the White House and was woefully uninformed about world politics.

At Kennebunkport, the politician and academic hit it off right away, and Rice was entrusted with a vital task: "to instruct and protect G.W. at his most vulnerable," as a friend put it.

How the woman who became his National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State has fulfilled that trust has had fateful consequences for the United States, other nations, and not least for George W. Bush.

Since the end of the Second World War, the National Security Adviser's staff domain has varied between a dozen and nearly 100, but its function has remained strikingly the same:

To be the presidency's eyes, ears, and brain, devoted like no other institution in Washington to protecting and serving the Chief Executive, the National Security Adviser's constituency of one.

Rice, who worked for Brent Scowcroft, a cautious NSC adviser under the elder president Bush, defined her role early in 2001 as "stitching the connections together tightly."

The gravity of the NSC Adviser's role demands an extraordinary combination of intellect and substantive knowledge, with shrewd understanding of both the world and Washington  a capacity that previous office-holders have had to varying degrees, from Henry Kissinger's 'mastery of power' on down.

Although usually relatively hidden from public view in her sensitive role as the president's advisor without peer, the Nigerien uranium scandal and case for war mounted by Rice illustrates vividly that she was a full party to the now notorious intelligence claims about Iraqi weaponry and ties to terrorists.

Prey to the same impulse of the uninformed men around her, she repeated to the 9/11 commission, in one of her rare under oath testimonies before Congress, the regime's cant about terrorism in general  insisting "they attacked us for who we are, for no other reason" ignoring a half century of history of American foreign policy and musing with stunning hubris that victory in Iraq will "inspire hope and encourage reform throughout the greater Middle East."

However history records Bush's policy and Rice's counsel of war, to all appearances Rice has succeeded at the one task required for advancement in the current Bush regime  maintaining by her fierce loyalty the patronage of the President.

And in line with an administration that joins eagles claw to religious cloak, Rice looks to the same sense of divine guidance that fortifies her patron. "When I'm concerned about something, I figure out a plan of action, and then I give it to God. I just ask to be carried through it," she said in a 2002 interview with Essence magazine. "God's never failed me yet." It is an opinion, of course, that history will not share. *

The evidence of Rice’s complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside operations of the NSC and Rice’s unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all.

What follows isn’t simple.

These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign policy.

But follow the bouncing ball of Rice’s deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability.

Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification for war, and thus in the President’s, Rice’s, and the regime’s inseparable credibility.

The discrediting of Wilson, in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney.

And when that moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed.

Motive, means, opportunityin the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all. *

(left)

An Iraqi woman reacts following an explosion in Baghdad, Monday, Feb. 13, 2006.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt Monday in a line of people waiting to receive government payments, killing six other people and wounding about 30, including children.

(right)

An Iraqi woman looks for her son following an explosion in Baghdad, Monday, Feb. 13, 2006.

He tells CIA debriefers that at his command after the Gulf War, “All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed.”

His claim is supported by continuing reports of UN inspectors and US intelligence, including sophisticated imagery analysis by both the CIA and Pentagon.

1999: The first rumors begin to circulate in Europe that the Iraqis may be trying to buy “yellow cake” weapons grade uranium from Niger, a poor West African country that earns more than half its export income from the strategic ore.

Since Iraq is known to have used only amply available Iraqi uranium in nuclear research until its disbanding in 1991, and because Niger’s yellow cake is produced solely at two mines owned by a French consortium and the entire output strictly controlled and committed to sale to France, European intelligence agencies and UN officials soon discount the storythough the rumors persist along with other alarming allegations by Iraqi exile groups long working to incite the US Government to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Meanwhile, American embassies and CIA stations in Europe routinely report the rumors in repeated, widely circulated cable traffic to Washington over the summer and fall of 1999.

Among the recipients is the nuclear non-proliferation section of the Clinton Presidency’s NSC staff, whose files on Iraq, a “red flag” country, are turned over to Rice and her staff when she assumes office eighteen months later

January 2001: Parties unknown burgle the Nigerien embassy in Rome. Stolen from the torn-up offices are various valuables along with stationery and official seals, which the Italian police warn might be used to forge documents.

February 24, 2001: “Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capacity with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” says Secretary of State Colin Powell. “He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

July 29, 2001: “We are able to keep his [Saddam’s] arms from him,” NSC advisor Rice tells the media. “His military forces have not been rebuilt.”

August 2001: An African informant reportedly hands Italian intelligence what are purported to be official Nigerien documents of “great importance.”

Among them are letters apparently dealing with Niger’s sale of uranium to Iraq, including an alleged transaction in 2000 for some 500 tons of uranium oxide, telltale in a weapons program.

The Italians routinely pass the letters on through NATO channels to the US, where by the fall of 2001 both State Department and Department of Energy nuclear intelligence analysts doubt the genuineness of the documents, and duly report their findings to Rice’s NSC staff.

January 2002: In cables cleared by both Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice, the first high-level reference to the subject after 9/11, Washington asks the US ambassador to Niger to uncover any possible Iraqi purchases of uranium.

After talks with senior Nigerien officials and French executives in the uranium mining operations, along with a still wider investigation by the embassy, including the CIA, the ambassador reports back that there is no evidence of such dealings, and no reason to suspect them.

February 2002: Vice President Cheney hears “about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger,” according to what his chief of staff Libby later tells Time.

In his daily intelligence briefing by the CIA, as Libby relates, Cheney asks about “the implication of the [Niger] report.”

CIA briefing officers tell Cheney and Libby of the documents passed on months before by the Italians, including the State and Energy Department judgment that the papers are probable forgeries.

A few days later, with the routine concurrence of Rice and her staff, Cheney through Libby asks the CIA to look into the matter further.

The Agency has no ready experts in Niger suitable to assign the Vice President’s requested inquiry.

After routinely canvassing the relevant offices and relatively brief discussion, they seize on the suggestion of one of their operatives working on nuclear proliferation issues, a mid-level CIA veteran named Valerie Plame who has worked abroad and in Washington under ”NOC” –non-official cover in private business in contact with several foreign sources.

Her pertinent if personal recommendation for the assignment is her husband, then-fifty-three year-old Joseph Wilson IV, a retired Foreign Service Officer who has served briefly as Charge d’Affairs in Baghdad in 1990 and then from 1992-1993 as US Ambassador to Gabon, a seasoned diplomat with experience in both Iraq and West Africa, and even some specialization in African strategic minerals.

February 19, 2002: A meeting at the CIA discusses sending Wilson to Niger.

Attending is an analyst from the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research who says the trip is unnecessary, since the US embassy in Niger and European intelligence agencies have already disproved the story of an Iraqi purchase  and whose notes of the meeting, including the facts of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity as an NOC operative on WMD and her role in recommending her husband, will be the basis for later crucial memos in the scandal.

Despite State Department objection, the CIA decides to go ahead with the Wilson mission to satisfy the Vice President’s request, and the former ambassador is “invited out [to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia] to meet with a group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject,” as he will remember it.

Wilson is introduced to the gathering by his wife, who then leaves the room.

In late February, with the concurrence of CIA Director George Tenet as well as Rice and Powell, Wilson flies to Niger.

February 24, 2002: Meanwhile, to further emphasize the importance of the issue and with Washington’s concurrence, the US Ambassador in Niger has invited to the capital of Niamey Marine four-star General Carlton Fulford, Jr., deputy commander of the US-European Command, which is responsible for military relations with sub-Saharan West Africa.

Fulford meets with Niger’s president and other senior officials on the 24th, and afterward confirms the Ambassador’s earlier findings, as he later tells the Washington Post, that there is no evidence of the sale of yellow cake to Iraq, and that Niger’s uranium supply is “secure.”

The General’s report duly goes up through the chain of his command to the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon and on to Rice at the NSC, Powell at State, the CIA, the Energy Department and other interested agencies.

March 5, 2002: Having met with several Nigerien officials and sources over a ten-day visit and debriefed at length the US Embassy staff and Ambassador (who promptly cables a report on to Powell and Rice), Wilson returns from Niger and gives CIA officers, as they request, an oral report which is the basis for a CIA-written memo on his trip then forwarded to Rice and Powell, and for a further CIA debriefing for Cheney in response to his original request.

Republicans will later dispute about how categorical or emphatic Wilson’s report and its derivatives actually are at this point.

He refers to "an Algerian-Nigerien intermediary" for Iraq who had approached Niger about sales of ore, though adds that Niger “ignored the request.”

But the essence of his conclusion is, once again, that there is no evidence of Iraq procuring uranium from Niger.

In de facto acceptance of this finding, the several Washington agencies involved in the issue, including Rice and her NSC staff, make no other effort  beyond the US embassy investigation, General Fulford’s trip, and the Wilson mission  to investigate the matter further in Niger or anywhere else.

May-June 2002: With the Iraq-Niger uranium issue apparently laid to rest, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld establishes in the Pentagon, with the full knowledge of Rice, a new Office of Special Plans, under the direction of Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and cabal of neo-conservatives the Bush regime has assembled at the upper civilian reaches of the Defense Department.

Believing the CIA, FBI and other agencies in myriad negative reports, including the Wilson mission, have simply “failed” to find existing evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz direct “Special Plans” to gather and interpret its own “intelligence” on Iraq.

Meanwhile Rice takes over coordination of efforts to stymie ongoing arms inspections of Iraq by the United Nations.

June 26, 2002: In a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair and other senior British officials at Ten Downing Street, Sir Richard Dearlove, “C,” head of MI6 British intelligence, reports on what he found during recent Washington conversations at the highest levels of the CIA, White House and other US official quarters.

“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” as a summary records his words.

“But intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

July 2002: Concerned at the potential opposition to the war, and to coordinate policy and media relations for the coming attack on Iraq, a special White House Iraq Group (WHIG) is set up, chaired by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and composed of Rice, Rove, Libby, Rice’s deputy Stephen Hadley, and media strategists Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush aide, Mary Matalin and others.

The WHIG is to plan and control carefully all high-level leaks and public statements on Iraq and related issues.

“Everything, I mean everything, was run through them and came out of them,” a ranking official will say of the group.

“It was understood, of course, that Condi or Hadley would clear everything from a policy point of view, Rove and Libby would do the politics, and the rest would handle the spin.”

September 2002: Several months earlier, the US and UN embargo of Iraq has seized a shipment of high strength aluminum tubes, which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US State and Energy Departments duly identify as designed solely for launch tubes for conventional artillery rockets.

Apparently reflecting the original rumors of the Iraq-Niger deal and the subsequent dubious documents handed the Italians thirteen months before (copies of which have reportedly been given to MI6 British intelligence by an Italian journalist), a British Government White Paper on Iraq released in September mentions that Baghdad “had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Pressed on the issue by the CIA (on the basis of its now-several reports debunking the story) to drop that statement as inaccurate, the British claim they have sources for the assertion “aside from the discredited [Nigerien] letters,” but never identify them.

Rice is fully briefed on all these exchanges.

(Eventually, British intelligence officials will admit the 2002 White Paper statement on uranium from Africa was “unfounded.”

Meanwhile, however, much of official Washington is aware of the CIA-MI6 squabble over the Niger uranium and questionable letters.

“The Brits,” a Congressional intelligence committee staffer will later tell the New Yorker’s Sy Hersh in discussing the issue, “…placed more stock in them than we did.”)

It’s also that September, in answer to a question in a CNN interview about what evidence the White House has of Iraqi nuclear weapons, that Rice makes her infamous quip, a line first authored by Mary Matalin  “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

September 26, 2002: In closed-hearing testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (with a transcript closely reviewed by Rice), Powell refers to “reports” of an Iraqi purchase of Nigerien uranium as “further proof” of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

October 2002: Seizing on the British White Paper, despite the documented disagreement of the CIA as well as the State and Energy Departments, the Office of Special Plans inserts in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, apparently one of the few documents Bush reads in this sequence, a reference to the British report of an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction.

Though the NIE at CIA insistence notes “different interpretations of the significance of the Niger documents,” and that the State Department judges them “highly dubious,” the reference to Nigerien uranium is listed among other reasons to conclude that Iraq poses a danger to American national security.

“Facing clear evidence of peril,” Bush says in a speech in Cincinnati that October, “we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Behind the scenes, an earlier draft of the October speech has also contained a reference to an Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of uranium from Niger, the now-revived claim from the discredited documents of fifteen months before.

CIA Director Tenet urges that the White House take out that reference, and though the Pentagon’s Special Plans office is pushing for inclusion of the reference, Rice’s deputy (and eventual successor) Stephen Hadley, after two memoranda and a phone call from Tenet, finally agrees to drop the passage.

Rice is fully briefed on all this.

December 19, 2002: As preparations are hurried for the attack on Iraq, a State Department “Fact Sheet,” cleared by Rice, asks ominously, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?”

The assumption of the Niger-Iraq uranium connection now begins to appear regularly in the President’s Daily Brief, the CIA intelligence briefing which is now also drafted under the influence of the Office of Special Plans.

January 23, 2003: In a New York Times op-ed entitled “Why We Know Iraq is Lying,” Rice refers prominently to “Iraq’s efforts to get uranium from abroad.”

January 28, 2003: "The British government,” Bush says in his State of the Union litany on the dangers of Iraq, “has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Rice and her staff, of course, have as always laboriously worked and reworked the national security passages of the speech.

In readying the address, Rice’s NSC Staff assistant for nonproliferation, Robert Joseph, asks Alan Foley, a ranking CIA expert on the subject, about the “uranium from Africa” passage, which obviously refers to the old Niger issue.

Foley says the CIA doubts the Niger letters and connection, has disputed the British White Paper (as Rice and Joseph well know), and recommends that the NSC strike the reference.

In typical bureaucratic fashion, however, Foley also says it would be “technically accurate” to say that the British had in fact issued such a report on Iraq, however mistaken.

With the approval of Rice and her deputy Hadley, the passage stays, becoming a major piece of “evidence” in the case for war.

February 5, 2003: In his now infamous presentation to the United Nations, a factor in silencing many potential dissenters in Congress, Powell pointedly omits any reference to the Nigerien uranium. The story “had not stood the test of time,” he says later.

That February, too, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as part of his own propaganda for war, issues a Ten Downing Street paper called “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,” which includes a reference to the Nigerien uranium.

Thought to be drawn from authoritative MI6 intelligence, the paper is soon widely ridiculed, eleven of its sixteen pages found to be copied verbatim from an old Israeli magazine.

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Police observe the vehicle that caught in fire following an explosion caused by a roadside bomb, in Baghdad, Monday, Feb. 20, 2006.

One SUV and a civilian car were damaged in the blast and three civilians were injured.

(right)

Injured Iraqis lie at a local hospital emergency room following an explosion in Baghdad, Monday, Feb. 20, 2006.

A suicide bomber detonated an explosives belt on a bus Monday in the Shiite district of Kazamiyah, killing 12 people and injuring 15.

Photos: AP/Samir Mizban, AP/Hadi Mizban

March 7, 2003: In response to a request four months before, the State Department finally hands over to the IAEA copies of the Niger letters, which UN experts promptly dismiss as “not authentic” and “blatant forgeries.”

“These documents are so bad,” a senior IAEA official tells the press, “that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.”

A former high-level intelligence official tells The New Yorker, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there. It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.”

March 8, 2003: In reply to questions about the forgery, a State Department spokesman says the US Government “fell for it.” "It was the information that we had. We provided it,” Powell will say lamely on “Meet the Press". “If that information is inaccurate, fine."

March 17, 2003: Bush, in a statement cleared by Rice, repeats that ”Iraq continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

March 21, 2003: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D. WVa) writes FBI Director Robert Mueller asking for an investigation of the Niger letters.

"There is a possibility,” Rockefeller says, “that the fabrication of these [Niger] documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq."

May 6, 2003: In an anonymous interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Ambassador Wilson  identified none too subtly as “a former US Ambassador to [sic] Africa”  says about the failure to find WMDs in Iraq: “It’s disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this [that Saddam had no nuclear program or weapons] for a year.”

June 10, 2003: Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman asks the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) for a briefing on the Niger uranium issue, and specifically the State Department’s opposition to the continuing White House view that Iraq had tried to buy yellow cake.

The resulting memo is dated the same day, and drawn from notes on the February 19 meeting at the CIA on the Wilson mission and other sources.

Befitting the sensitivity of the information, the memo is classified “Top Secret,” and contains in one paragraph, separately marked ‘(S/NF)” for “Secret/No dissemination to foreign governments or intelligence agencies, ” two sentences describing in passing Valerie “Wilson’s” identity as a CIA operative and her role in the inception of the Wilson trip to Niger.

This June 10 memo reportedly does not use her maiden name Plame.

June 12, 2003: The Washington Post reports that an unnamed “former US ambassador” was sent to Niger to look into the uranium issue and found no evidence of any Iraqi purchase.

At the State Department, Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage asks INR to prepare a memorandum on the background of what the Post is reporting, and INR sends to Armitage that same day a copy of the June 10 memo to Grossman.

The memo is also sent to Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security (and future UN Ambassador-designate) John Bolton.

July 6, 2003: Outraged by continuing references to the Nigerien uranium, Wilson breaks his anonymity with a sensational New York Times op-ed disclosing his mission to Niger sixteen months before, and the fact that he found no evidence of an Iraqi purchase of ore.

"Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war," Wilson writes, "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

He tells "Meet the Press," "Either the administration has information that it has not shared with the public or ... they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to bolster a decision that had already been made to go to war."

Later in the day, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage calls INR Assistant Secretary Carl W. Ford at home, and asks him to send a briefing memo to Powell about the Niger uranium issue.

Ford simply pulls out the previous June 10 memo with its reference to Wilson’s wife (her name now corrected from Wilson to Plame), addresses it to Powell, and forwards the memo to Rice to be passed on to Powell, who is due to leave the next day with the Presidential party on a trip to Africa.

Meanwhile, the WHIG is also moving that Sunday to deal aggressively with the Wilson op-ed.

They will no longer focus on the too obviously fraudulent claim of an Iraqi purchase of yellow cake  White House orthodoxy before the invasion  but will instead discount the issue, discredit Wilson, and shift blame for the now-embarrassing State of the Union reference.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer is to try to downplay and dismiss Wilson’s article on-the-record at the next day’s press briefing, while Rice and others begin to make off-the-record calls to the media to do the same.

While pursuing their own contacts among right-wing reporters and columnists, Rove and Libby are also to work with CIA Director George Tenet in a statement by Tenet taking responsibility for any inaccuracy in the State of the Union passage.

July 7, 2003: Under a barrage of questions at a 9:30 am press briefing, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says of the Wilson claims, “There is zero, nada, nothing new here,’ adding that "Wilson's own report [shows] that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger about sales."

(A reference to the “Algerian-Nigerien intermediary” in Wilson’s debriefings… "That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import a significant quantity of uranium as the President alleged?" Wilson later that day replies to Fleischer. "These guys really need to get serious.")

But as the briefing wears on, Fleischer’s defense grows “murkier,” as the New York Times reports, and he seems to “concede” that the State of the Union reference to Niger uranium “might have been flawed.”

That evening, with the White House scrambling to defend itself against Wilson’s resonating charges, Bush leaves for a trip to Africa, accompanied by Rice and Powell.

Before the party flies out of Andrews, Rice is in several meetings with Rove, Libby and other senior aides of the WHIG.

The scene now shifts to the plush but still relatively close quarters of Air Force One, the specially configured 747 where the accompanying media are boarded through a rear door and funneled directly to their mid-level section closed off from the forward official compartment, and where Administration VIPs like Rice and Powell are in conference rooms and adjoining lounge chairs in closer and easier proximity and informality than in any other official venue.

It is in this setting, soon after takeoff, as the New York Times will report two years later, that Powell is seen walking around carrying the INR June 12/July6 memo detailing Wilson’s mission and Plame’s identity and role in the “(S/NF)” paragraph.

Powell discusses the memo with Rice and other presidential aides on board, including press secretary Ari Fleischer. Witnesses later see Fleischer “perusing” the memo.

There are reports, too, of several calls between the plane and the White House discussing the Wilson affair.

En route over the Atlantic, Rice and Fleischer both call contacts at the Washington Post and New York Times “to make it clear,” the Times will report, “that they no longer stood behind Mr. Bush’s statement about the uranium  the first such official concession on the sensitive issue of the intelligence that led to the war.”

It is in these hours of late July 7 and early July 8 that Rove, Libby and other officials get word of Plame’s identity from Air Force One.

Rove and Libby will hear of Plame in the drafting with Tenet of his mea culpa, but officials on the plane reading the INR memo cannot know or be sure of this, and the memo’s passages on Wilson, including his wife, are now relayed back to Washington.

Reporters later speculate that Powell might have called either Rove or Libby with such information, but as one concludes aptly, “That was above his pay grade.”

The President himself might have read the memo and called the two aides.

But given Bush’s style and grasp, that, too, is implausible, though he may well have been informed of the calls and given his approval.

The only official on board Air Force One with the knowledge and authority  motive, means and opportunity  to instruct Rove and Libby in their leaks and so betray Plame was Condoleezza Rice.

(left)

An Iraqi youth, suffering from severe burns in his face, rests at a local hospital in Baghdad.

At least 23 Iraqis were killed and 60 wounded in a slew of attacks, including a suicide bombing in which 12 commuters burnt to death on a Baghdad minibus, February 20, 2005

(right)

An Iraqi bombing victim grimaces inside a hospital after a suicide bomb attack in Kadhimiya district in Baghdad February 20, 2006.

A suicide bomber strapped with explosives climbed aboard a bus and blew himself up, killing at least 12 people.

Photos: AFP/Karim Sahib, REUTERS/Ali Jasim

July 7-8, 2003: Right-wing Columnist Robert Novak is called by thus far unidentified senior officials leaking to him that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame (they use her maiden name), is a CIA operative who instigated her husband’s trip to Niger. “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me,” Novak tells Newsweek of the leak. “They thought it was significant. They gave me the name and I used it.”

July 9, 2003: Rove discusses the Wilson imbroglio, including the role of Wilson’s CIA wife, with columnist Robert Novak, who identifies her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame.

July 11, 2003: Peppered by questions about Wilson’s charges, Bush in a press conference in Uganda says, “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services.”

That evening, aboard Air Force One flying over East Africa, Rice speaks at length with the media about the “clearances” of the President’s speech.

“Now I can tell you,” she says, “if the CIA, the director of central intelligence, had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have gone without question.”

She says nothing about the actual maneuvering behind the now-troublesome passage, the Joseph-Foley exchange, the controversial British memorandum US intelligence has disputed, the shadowy history of the yellow cake fraud.

July 11, 2003: Back in Washington, working to discredit Wilson, Rove leaks to Time’s Matthew Cooper that “Wilson’s wife” is, in fact, in the CIA “working on WMD” and has been behind his mission to Niger.

Rove “implied strongly,” Cooper later emails his editor, “there’s still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger.”

After that conversation, in evidence of the central role of Rice and her staff in the betrayal of Plame’s identity to discredit Wilson, Rove emails Rice’s NSC deputy Hadley that he has “waved Cooper off” Wilson’s claim, and that he (Rove) “didn’t take the bait” when Cooper offered that Wilson’s revelations had damaged the Administration.

Hadley immediately relays this message to Rice in Africa.

That same day, after extensive deliberations with Rove and Libby, CIA Director Tenet makes a public statement that the Nigerien uranium allegation should never have appeared in the Bush 2003 State of the Union.

"This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches,” he confesses, “and CIA should have ensured that it was removed,"

July 12, 2003: When asked by Cooper about Plame being CIA, Libby confirms the story to the Time reporter.

That same day, in a talk with the Washington Post’s Walt Pincus, an unidentified “senior administration official” brings up Plame’s CIA identity, in what is now a widely authorized leak approved by Rice as well as Rove.

July 14, 2003: Columnist Robert Novak, attributing the story to “two senior administration officials”
 neither of which is Rove or Libby  identifies Plame as a CIA “operative on weapons of mass destruction” who was behind her husband’s mission to Niger.

July 20, 2003: “Senior White House sources” call NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell to say, “the real story here is not the 16 words [Bush’s reference to Niger uranium in the State of the Union]… but Wilson and his wife.”

July 21, 2003: On MSNBC, host Chris Mathews tells Wilson, “I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says, and I quote, ‘Wilson’s wife is fair game.’”

July 30, 2003: Alarmed about the impact of the betrayal of Plame’s identity on current and future agents and sources abroad, the CIA asks the Justice Department to investigate the leak, which leads to the naming of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald as a Special Prosecutor.

September 2003: An unidentified “White House official” tells the Washington Post that “at least six reporters” had been told about Plame before Novak’s column appeared. The disclosures, the source says, were “purely and simply out of revenge.”

This chronology will no doubt continue to expand in the days and weeks ahead.

There may well be a ticking time-bomb in the Grand Jury investigation of the Plame leak that goes beyond anything we now envision.

In earlier findings in cases of reporters refusing to testify, DC Circuit Judge, David Tatel, a distinguished jurist known for his devotion to civil liberties and especially press freedoms, had stoutly maintained a federal privilege for the media, shielding it from being compelled to testify except under the most exceptional conditions.

But then later joining his colleagues in ordering Cooper and the New York Times’ Judith Miller to testify, Tatel reviewed extensive secret information from the prosecutor, devoted eight blacked-out pages of his judgment to the material, and concluded that the privilege he had upheld throughout his career as a lawyer and judge had to give way before "the gravity of the suspected crime."

No other element of the scandal bodes so ill for the Bush regime.

(left)

This handout photo from Australia's SBS TV released 15 February allegedly shows a prisoner in Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib jail being held by a US soldier in front of a dog in Baghdad in 2004.

A top Pentagon lawyer announces that he warned the White House that its detainee policy would lead to the kind of abuse that eventually took place at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

CIA complicity, encouragement, and participation is also being focused upon.

(right)

Abu Ghraib photo shows a man, his clothes off, being threatened by a dog.

Second photo shows the arab man prone on the floor, naked from the waist down.

He has a wound on his leg, showing the dog had bitten him.

Photos: SBS-HO, http://bellaciao.org/en/

There is also the intriguing relationship between John Bolton, the regime’s stymied appointee to the UN, and Judith Miller, the New York Times correspondent sent to jail for contempt in refusing to divulge her sources on Plame even for a story she never wrote.

Bolton’s close relationship to Miller, in which many suspect the right-wing lobbyist handed the reporter much of the fraudulent accounts of Iraqi weaponry that ended up on the front page of the Times, may well have encompassed as well the passing of information from the INR memo on Plame, which Bolton saw before Powell or even Rice.

Then, too, as the Progressive Review’s Sam Smith and Counterpunch’s Alexander Cockburn have pointed out from their lonely perch of substance and perspective atop what’s left of American journalism, there is, in the end, much less to the whole story than meets the eye.

In their too obvious relish of celebrity, Wilson and Plame as heroes are as dubious as the Niger letters.

The CIA, and the Presidents who used it as a private mafia, account for a more than half-century history far more catastrophic than a legion of seedy Roves and Libbys or even multiple Bush regimes.

Relentlessly corrupt, inept, anachronistic, if ever an institution deserved to be “outed” and prosecuted in its numbers, it is our vastly bloodstained intelligence agency.

But as it is so often in politics, we are left with the lesser, still needed reckoning at hand.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

And, of course, the larger issue beyond Plame is the Bush regime’s Big Lie behind the invasion of Iraq, in which the phantom Nigerien yellowcake was an important malignant element.

No government since World War II has more blatantly invented the pretext for waging a war of aggression.

The Rove and Libby collusion only begins to peel away the layers of the crime.

Rice is the next skein to be pulled.

Her manifest failures in the fateful months before 9/11 in meeting the principal responsibilities of the National Security Advisor  the sheer incompetence and shallowness that left so much intelligence uncoordinated, so much neglected or misunderstood  should have been enough to have run her from public office long ago, of course, were it not for her hold on this tragically flawed president, and her deplorable immunity amid the chronic political cowardice of both the Democrats and the media.

Now, however, her role in the Plame scandal cannot be ignored or excused.

She alone among senior officials was knowing and complicitous at every successive stage of the great half-baked yellow cake fraud.

She alone was the White House peer  and in national security matters the superior  to Rove and Libby, who never could have acted without her collusion in peddling Plame’s identity.

She as much as anyone had a stake in smearing Wilson by any and all means at hand.

If Rove and Libby are to be held criminally or at least politically accountable for a breach of national security, our “mushroom cloud” secretary of state should certainly be in the dock with them

(This article owes a primary debt to the ground-breaking research of Professor Gary Leupp of Tufts University in his “Faith-Based Intelligence,” CounterPunch.org, July 26, 2003.)

Roger Morris was Senior Staff on the National Security Council under both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, until resigning over the invasion of Cambodia. An award winning author, he has written extensively about the Presidency and American foreign policy.

Iraqi policemen secure the scene of a roadside bomb attack along a highway in Baghdad, February 20, 2006.

(right)

Wounded Iraqis are transferred to Kindi hospital in Baghdad following an explosion, Monday, Feb. 20, 2006.

The explosion happened shortly before 8 a.m. near Liberation Square in the Bab Sharqi area where a group of men were waiting near stands serving tea and falafel sandwiches.

At least four workers were killed and 14 other people wounded including one policeman.

Photos: REUTERS/Mohammed Ameen, AP/Karim Kadim

Raul Castro, head of Cuba's armed forces and brother of Cuba's President Fidel Castro, attends an event in Havana March 13, 2007.

Raul Castro, who turns 76 on June 3, 2007, stepped out from the shadow of his famous elder brother Fidel Castro 10 months ago act as leader while his brother is recuperating.

Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Daut

June 1, 2007

47 Years Later in HavanaReturn to Cuba

By SAUL LANDAUI landed at Jose Marti International airport in May of 1960, 17 months after a young, bearded man and his fellow barbudos had captured control of the island and sent a hated dictator fleeing.

Musicians played a lively tune as the passengers deplaned, a young woman pushed a rum-flavored drink into my hand and I spotted a young, uniformed man with lieutenant's bars on his shoulders.

I gave him the note that Raulito Roa (of the Cuban UN delegation) had given me in New York, saying I was a young progressive writer and to provide me with help in understanding the revolution.

Bola de Nieve performing at Hotel Nacional where Meyer Lansky ran Mafia operations until January 1959

Richard's velocity of speech outpaced my meager comprehension of Spanish, but I did understand that "the revolution had opened the prisms of hope in the eyes of the Cuban people," and that I should wait outside the Hotel Presidente at 8 a.m. to get picked up for a trip to eastern Cuba.

I spent a few hours walking around Havana and trying to engage people in conversations.

I had a rum drink at Club Red and heard a singer called La Lupe.

I saw a sign for Bola de Nieve performing at the Hotel Nacional where Meyer Lansky ran Mafia operations until January 1959.

I saw the sign Habana Libre, flashing from the hotel that used to say Havana Hilton.

I hadn't yet realized Santeria played a more powerful role in spiritual life of the island than the Church

I didn't hear explosions and shooting in the street, although the CIA's terrorist campaign from Florida was well underway.

I walked along the Malecon (the ocean walk), passing couples necking, others fishing.

In the morning, a jeep stopped in front of the hotel, a young man asked my name, introduced himself as Julio, grabbed my suit case and motioned for me to hop in.

I shared the ride with three Chileans back to the airport, bound for Santiago de Cuba, some 500 miles to the east.

What kind of revolution is this, I thought, filled with music and dancing in a Catholic country  I hadn't yet realized that Santeria played a more powerful role in the spiritual life of the island than the Church.

Marta, one of the Chileans, questioned Cuba's growing connection to the Soviet Union as well as the ever advancing role of the Cuban Communist Party in revolutionary decisions.

We cruised the countryside outside Santiago de Cuba seeing the revolution's new construction and slum clearance projects

In the October 1959 election for head of Cuba's National Labor council Fidel personally had stepped in to prevent the victory of David Salvador who was an outspoken anti-communist.

In the same time period, Fidel personally arrested Huber Matos, who commanded Camaguey Province.

Matos had objected to the sweeping land reforms and to the growing relationship with Moscow.

The militant anti-imperialist and anti-Yankee language of Che Guevara, for example, and Raul Castro's past links with Cuba's Communist Youth movement had provoked U.S. newspaper columnists and Congressmen alike to question Fidel's commitment to the very axioms of the Cold War: anti-Sovietism uber alles.

By June 1960, we cruised the countryside outside Santiago de Cuba and saw the revolution's new construction and slum clearance projects; I heard only praise for the Soviets from revolutionary cadre.

Marta's skepticism increased.

Cuba's National Aquarium

April, 11, 2007

A therapist shows a sea tortoise to a boy, who has Down syndrome, at the Cuba's National Aquarium in Havana, Wednesday, April 11, 2007.

Dolphins, sea tortoises and sea lions at Cuba's National Aquarium have been helping disabled children and children with special needs, such with autism, Down Syndrome or mental retardation, increasing both their independence and sociability.

Photo: AP/Javier Galeano

Contact helps increase independence

Disabled children play with a sea lion at the Cuba's National Aquarium in Havana, Wednesday, April 11, 2007.

The contact with dolphins, sea tortoises and sea lions helps children with autism, Down syndrome or mental retardation, to increase their independence and sociability.

Marta looked angry. "It should not be permitted for human to live like this," she said:

"But in Chile there are similar shantytowns.

I would imagine that almost every city in Latin America has them."

By the end of the visit Marta had become convinced that Cuba could not rely on any help from the United States, and had no option but to turn to Moscow.
"But in Chile there are similar shantytowns.

"This one won't be here long," one of the Cubans pledged. "But in Chile there are similar shantytowns."

"The plans to raze it and construct new housing are well underway.

But under the old regimes no one cared to do anything about such conditions.

This is why we're showing it to you, so you'll understand why we had to make a revolution."

US militarism

Spanish cameraman killed

A U.S. tank at the entrance of the Palestine Hotel, Baghdad, May 9, 2003.

A Spanish judge decided on Thursday to press on with charges against three U.S. soldiers for killing a Spanish television cameraman while he was in the Palestine Hotel shortly after the intial attack on Iraq, denying a state appeal.

Photo: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

No, you really cannot make this up

Rice reproaches Spain for its business contacts with Cuba, says Spain should be killing more Afghanistan people as the United States is doing.

Madrid, Spain

June 1, 2007

US militarism.

Rice poison is on the placard.

Demonstrators shout slogans against the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in central Madrid, June 1, 2007.

No, you really cannot make this up.

Rice reproaches Spain in a visit on Friday for its business contacts with Cuba, and said Spain should be killing more Afghanistan people as the United States is doing.

Photo: REUTERS/Andrea Comas

What can we say!

US militarism.

Rice, Bush bulldog and Uncle Tom

No, you really cannot make this up.

Rice reproaches Spain in a visit on Friday for its business contacts with Cuba, and said Spain should be killing more Afghanistan people as the United States is doing.

Photo: REUTERS/Andrea Comas

US militarism

Empty coffin of dead soldier driven to demonstration by father protesting illegal war

US militarism.

People protest at the main gate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., Wednesday, May 23, 2007, as Bush arrives.

An empty coffin of US Marine Lance Cpl. Alexander S. Arrendondo, slain in Iraq in 2004, was driven to the demonstration by his father Carlos.

Photo: AP/George Ruhe

US paid for insanity

Notice the surrounding US taxpayers give him

US paid for insanity.

US militarism.

Bush walks on the South Lawn of the White House Washington, DC. May 23, 2007

Photo: AFP/Saul Loeb

The jeep took us about a thousand feet up into the Sierra Maestra where the guerrillas successfully operated for two years between late December 1956 and their successful capture of the island in January 1959.

I asked Julio how a few hundred men could possibly have defeated an army that numbered some fifty thousand.

He smiled.

"We had will, determination, the cooperation of a large underground organization and the vast majority of the people.

The Batista government had no support, except from Washington.

They not only tortured and murdered; they did nothing for the people.

Look around.

Moreover, Cuba's institutions did not function, which made it ripe for revolution."

I tried to imagine Fidel and his bearded men disembarking to face an ambush, cries of betrayal amidst rifle and machine gun fire

Then the guides brought us to the place near Manzanillo where the yacht Granma landed in early December 1956.

I tried to imagine Fidel and his bearded men disembarking to face an ambush, cries of betrayal amidst rifle and machine gun fire, the sight and smell of human blood on the road lined with white shelled crabs, crawling to and from the swampy grasses on either side of the road.

Fidel and a small group of sick, wounded and exhausted guerrillas somehow escaped and climbed to the high points of the nearby mountains.

One of the guides told us of Fidel peering across the island and commenting to the weary survivors: "The days of the dictatorship are numbered."

As we drove downhill, I wondered whether President Eisenhower, who had supposedly authorized the CIA to organize anti-Castro Cuban exiles to in the near future invade the island and overthrow the revolutionary government, had any idea of the already living legend he would be facing.

Plans to redistribute wealth to and make investment in the impoverished countryside

Julio talked of plans to redistribute wealth to and make investment in the impoverished countryside.

The revolutionaries had already expropriated large estates and many other businesses, including major U.S. companies.

Shortly after I returned to Havana, in July 1960, Fidel took over the U.S.-owned oil refineries, which had refused on orders from Washington to refine imported Soviet oil.

Walking from the bus to the Tropicana to hear a jazz combo, we ran into Guillermo Cabrera Infante, then editor of Lunes de Revolucion, the cultural supplement of Revolution, the government's newspaper, and passed a demonstration denouncing Ike.

(Lunes de Revolucion was closed in 1961. Cabrera Infante served as Cuba's cultural attaché in Belgium. He defected in 1964 and in England wrote several acclaimed novels before his death.)

When I left Cuba in February 1961 I saw young men hoisting four barreled anti aircraft guns onto the roof of the lobby of the Hotel Riviera.

Others planted dynamite under bridges.

All of Cuba awaited the U.S.-backed invasion that finally came in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs.

When the battle ended, Cuba had symbolically lost its boss and still had its ass.

Over the next decades it struggled to keep it.

Boy buys bread at Agro (farmers market)

March 1962, Cuba guarantee citizens a basic amount of food at low prices

Havana

June 1, 2007

A boy walks after buying some bread at a farmer market, known as 'agro', in Havana, Saturday May 26, 2007.

Cuba's universal ration was launched in March 1962 to guarantee citizens a basic amount of food at low prices.

No, you really cannot make this up.

Rice reproaches Spain in a visit on Friday for its business contacts with Cuba, and said Spain should be killing more Afghanistan people as the United States is doing.

Photo: AP/Javier Galeano

I would look that way also if I were a member of the U.S. congress visiting Cuba, May 29, 2007

No, you really cannot make this stuff up.

Rice is in Spain two days later reproaching Spain for its business contacts with Cuba, saying Spain should be killing more Afghanistan people as the United States is doing

Ricardo Alarcon (L), president of Cuba's National Assembly, shakes hands with Rosa DeLauro, member of the U.S. congress in Havana May 29, 2007.

No, you really cannot make this up.

Rice is in Spain Friday, June 1, 2007 reproaching Spain for its business contacts with Cuba, and said Spain should be killing more Afghanistan people as the United States is doing.

Photo: REUTERS/Andrea Comas

Kisses Dolphin

Therapist Yenia Exposito kisses a dolphin as Dianis Perez, who has Down syndrome, looks on at the Cuba's National Aquarium in Havana Wednesday, April 11, 2007.

The contact with dolphins, sea tortoises and sea lions helps children with autism, Down syndrome or mental retardation, to increase their independence and sociability.

Photo: AP/Javier Galeano

Therapist Daniel SanPedro and disabled children play with a dolphin at the Cuba's National Aquarium in Havana, Wednesday, April 11, 2007.

The contact with dolphins, sea tortoises and sea lions helps children with autism, Down syndrome or mental retardation, to increase their independence and sociability.

Photo: AP/Javier Galeano

Therapist Madelen Fernandez and a disabled child swim with a dolphin at the Cuba's National Aquarium in Havana, Wednesday, April 11, 2007.

Dolphins, sea tortoises and sea lions at Cuba's National Aquarium have been helping children with special needs, such with autism, Down Syndrome or mental retardation, increasing both their independence and sociability.

Photo: AP/Javier Galeano

Ecuador's Vice President Lenin Moreno tours Old Havana during his official visit to Cuba May 27, 2007

Ecuador's Vice President Lenin Moreno (C) tours Old Havana during his official visit to Cuba May 27, 2007.

Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Daut

Three-year-old David Roman, who has Down syndrome, plays with a sea lion at the Cuba's National Aquarium in Havana, Thursday, May 17, 2007.

Dolphins, sea tortoises and sea lions at Cuba's National Aquarium have been helping children with special needs, such with autism, Down Syndrome or mental retardation, increasing both their independence and sociability.

Photo: AP/Javier Galeano

From Kewe TheWE.cc

It is not possible for me to adequately express wording for what has taken place in American society, from Bush down, with regard to the U.S. government's practices of torture.

Needless to say all who have been involved should not in the future  to human, animal or insect  have any contact.

All in the medical profession, all psychologists and psychiatrists, all military personnel, all government servants involved, should be tried as war criminals of the highest order.

In 2005, the American Psychological Association convened a Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security that concluded psychologists' participation in military interrogations was "consistent with the APA Code of Ethics."

It was later revealed that six of nine voting members were from the military and intelligence agencies with direct connections to interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we speak with two members of the task force, Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo and Dr. Nina Thomas.

Arrigo says the task force report "should be annulled," because the process was "flawed."

As an example, Arrigo says she was "told very sharply" by one of the military psychologists not to take notes during the proceedings.

She later archived the entire listserve of the task force and sent it to Senate Armed Services Committee.

We also speak with Dr. Eric Anders, a former Air Force officer who underwent harsh training in "SERE" (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) techniques, as well as Dr. Leonard Rubenstein, Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights.

Radical analysis and action undertaken by millions will change system that requires these wars to survive

The most poignant paragraph in Sheehan's statement begins with her sad acknowledgment that her son died for absolutely nothing.

One can only imagine the emotions that come from this realization.

Like many of her fellow citizens, Sheehan wants to believe that the United States is a good place and that the people who live there do believe in the principles espoused in its documents and by its greatest leaders.

Her discovery that "Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months" is a difficult thing to take.

Yet, this is not a reason to quit.

It is, instead, a motivation to change things at an even more fundamental level.

One may not like being called a radical because they oppose the wars Washington has dragged us into, but one must also become aware that only radical analysis and action undertaken by millions will change a system that requires those wars to survive.

Breather from the madness

I recall a discussion I had with a friend during the buildup to the first Gulf War.

We were talking about activist burnout and egotistical activists as we watched the antiwar movement in Olympia, WA. grow by leaps and bounds while it struggled with internal conflicts that were primarily ego-driven.

I said to my friend that whenever I felt an organization couldn't live without me, then it was time for me to step back from whatever high-profile position I happened to be in and go back to the grunt work of passing out leaflets and setting up stages.

I wish Cindy Sheehan a peaceful and restorative time away from the frontlines of the antiwar movement.

Her presence, commitment and personality have made a good deal of difference in the growth of the movement against Washington's wars.

Indeed, it can be reasonably argued that it was Cindy Sheehan that made it okay for Middle America to protest, and for that she must be thanked.

Now that she is taking a breather from the madness it is up to us to continue expanding those protests.

It is certainly not time to give up.

Aged 29

Died May 25, 2007

Iraq

US Army Pvt. William L. Bailey III, was killed in Iraq, Friday, May 25, 2007, when a roadside bomb struck his vehicle.

William Bailey, a 29-year-old Bellevue man, was a five-year veteran of the fire department.

William Bailey leaves behind a wife and five children.

Photo: Bellevue Fire Department

Robert Scheer: Rice More Sordid Than Foley

Posted on Oct 3, 2006

By Robert Scheer

They are such liars. On Monday, a State Department spokesman conceded that then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice had indeed been briefed in July 2001 by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, about the alarming potential for an Al Qaeda attack, as Bob Woodward has reported in his aptly named new book, “State of Denial.”

“I don’t remember a so-called emergency meeting,” Rice had said only hours earlier, apparently still suffering from some sort of post-9/11 amnesia that seemed to afflict her during her forced testimony to the 9/11 Commission.

The omission of this meeting from the final commission report is another example of how the Bush administration undermined the bipartisan investigation that the president had tried to prevent. Nor is it just Rice who should be challenged, for Tenet seems to have provided Woodward with details concerning the administration’s indifference to the terrorist threat that he did not share with the 9/11 Commission.

Said he needed to see her right away

In his book, Woodward described an encounter between Rice and Tenet, in a near panic about a rising flood of intelligence warnings just presented to him by top aide Cofer Black. Tenet forced an unscheduled meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, because he wanted the Bush administration to take action immediately against Al Qaeda to disrupt a possible domestic attack.

“Tenet ... decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away...”

“He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.”

A mountain of evidence proves that the Bush administration did nothing of the sort.

Not remembering confirms her inattention to terror reports

Now, if Rice truly does not remember that now-confirmed meetingwhich was apparently first reported in the Aug. 4, 2002, Time magazine in an article titled “Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?”  wouldn’t that indicate she didn’t take it that seriously?

Not remembering confirms her inattention to terror reports at a time the Bush administration was already fixated on “regime change” in Iraq.

Rice is famously sharp and has an awesome memory.

Considering the trauma of 9/11 and its effects, it is inconceivable that Rice would not recall such an ominous and prescient briefing by Tenet and Black, especially after the 9/11 Commission forced her to document and review her actions in those crucial months.

We were not presented with a plan

It is, however, as she stated Monday, “incomprehensible” that she, then the national security advisor to the president and the person most clearly charged with sounding the alarm, would have ignored the threat.

But ignore it the administration did, and then later tried to lay the blame on the Clinton administration, which, Rice claimed at the 9/11 Commission hearings, lied when it said it had given the incoming White House team an action plan for fighting Al Qaeda.

“We were not presented with a plan,” Rice infamously argued under questioning from former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), but instead were given a memo with “a series of actionable items” describing how to tackle Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Such weaseling would be funny if the topic were not so serious.

But there is no way Rice can squirm out of this one, despite her impressive track record of calculated distortion on everything from Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs to the trumped-up ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Can there be any better case for turning over control of at least one branch of Congress to the opposition party so that we might finally have hearings to learn the truth of this matter, which is far more important, and sordid, than the Foley affair?

Three year old son

died October 6, 2006

Boys caught in cross fire

between occupying US soldier

and Iraq resistance fighters

(left)

A father weeps over body of his son, wrapped in a blanket, at a hospital in Baquba October 6, 2006.

The boy was killed in crossfire during a gun battle between Iraq resistance fighters and US occupying soldiers.

(right)

A woman cries beside her wounded son while waiting for treatment at a hospital in Baquba October 6, 2006.

The boy was wounded in crossfire during a gun battle between Iraq resistance fighters and US occupying soldiers.

Photos: REUTERS/Helmiy al-Azawi

July 26, 2003

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHThe scandal over the Niger uranium intelligence, dismissed wishfully by high ranking Republicans in the House and Senate as a fuss about "a flaw here or there," or "nothing but an absurd, media-driven, diversionary tactic," is in fact just one fragment of a much broader Intel-gate scandal.

That scandal is succinctly summed up by Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the private Arms Control Association: "the administration made its case for going to war by misrepresenting intelligence findings as well as citing discredited intelligence information."

Greg Thielmann, who worked until last fall as a proliferation expert in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, explains, "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: 'We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.'"

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of anti-terrorism operations and analysis at the CIA., says the neocon "cabal" leading the administration has "never been able to coalesce as they have now.

September 11th gave them the opportunity, and now they're in heaven.

They believe the intelligence [justifying war on Iraq] is there.

They want to believe it.

It has to be there."

(left)

A woman cries as her son receives treatment at a hospital in Baquba October 6, 2006.

The boy was wounded in crossfire during a gun battle between Iraq resistance fighters and US occupying soldiers.

A father weeps as he holds the body of his three-year old son Kerar Sadiq in Baqouba hospital yard, Iraq, Friday, Oct. 6, 2006.

The young boy lived in Khan Bani Saad village just outside Baqouba.

Photos: REUTERS/Helmiy al-Azawi, AP/Mohammed Adnan

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHThey wanted to believe (and more importantly wanted us to believe) that Saddam was hunting for uranium in Africa.
So Bush told us that, indeed, Saddam definitely was.

As Condoleezza Rice put it

They wanted to believe that the high strength aluminum tubes apprehended en route to Iraq last year, which IAEA as well as the U.S. State and Energy Departments say are intended to build launch tubes for artillery rockets, were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs," as Condoleezza Rice put it last September.

They wanted us to accept specific allegations, not yet proven during three months of occupation, such as: Iraq "has stocked at least 100 metric tons, and possibly as much as 500 metric tons" of chemical agents "much of it added in the last year."

al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in cahoots

The neocons wanted us to be terrorized by the threat of Iraq, to associate Iraq with terrorist groups, and to view war with Iraq not as a distraction from the war on terrorism focused on al-Qaeda but as part and parcel of an endless terror war waged against disparate objects.

Thus we were advised that the Boeing 707 and Tupolev 154 fuselages at Salman Pak, which the Iraqi's describe as an anti-terrorism training base, were used for training terrorists (including al-Qaeda) in hijacking.

The most egregious piece of disinformation circulated by the administration was that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in cahoots.

An intimate operational connection was highly unlikely, and the Bush charge immediately raised the eyebrows of Middle East scholars aware of the historical mutual hatred between the fundamentalist terrorist group and the secular Baathist state.

But (banking on ignorance and anti-Arab racism), the neocons were able to blur the distinction between the two and, as Rice put it, "exploit new opportunities" to implement longstanding plans for regime change in Iraq.

If there's to be a thorough investigation into the "faith-based intelligence" that produced the current quagmire, it should focus on the effort, underway within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks, to link bin Laden and Saddam, to thus prepare the country for war on Iraq.

Members of the 'Raging Grannies' activist group sing 'Bring the Troops Back Home Alive' as they take part in a protest against the Iraq war and the US President Bush, Thursday, Oct. 5, 2006, in downtown Seattle.

The protest was part of a national protest effort that saw demonstrations in other cities across the U.S.

Photos: Family Handout, AP/Ted S. Warren

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHThey wanted us to believe that, as Rumsfeld told the press in the summer of 2002, "There are al-Qaeda in a number of locations in Iraq," the implication being that they were there enjoying Saddam's hospitality.

Iraq has "clear ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda," Powell told world leaders in Switzerland last January.

Baghdad had provided weapons for U.S.-backed Kurdish forces

They wanted us to believe that Ansar al-Islam, a group of hundreds of Kurds and Arabs controlling several villages in northern Iraq and accused of al-Qaeda links, was operating with Saddam's blessing.

(But it operated in a Kurdish-controlled zone, where it skirmished with U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. Tariq Aziz claimed that Baghdad had actually provided weapons to the latter for use against Ansar al-Islam.)

They wanted us to believe that Ansar with Saddam's blessing was producing chemical weapons; the obliterated sites of the group's activity provide no evidence for that.

al-Zarqawi

They asked us to believe that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who heads a group called Jund al-Shams, or Soldiers of the Levant, which operates in Syria and Jordan; who is accused of masterminding the assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan last October; and who specializes in chemical and biological terrorism) is a ranking al-Qaeda working with Saddam's regime.

But as one exasperated U.S. intelligence source told The Age, "the intelligence is practically non-existent.

It is impossible to support the bald conclusions being made by the White House and the Pentagon given the poor quantity and quality of the intelligence available.

There is uproar within the intelligence community on all of these points, but the Bush White House has quashed dissent and written out those analysts who don't agree with their views."

Zarqawi received medical treatment (a leg amputation) in a Baghdad hospital in 2002 after fleeing Afghanistan via Iran (from which he may have been expelled), and then apparently disappeared by August.

His presence in Iraq is known because of intercepted phone calls to his family in Jordan, which give no indication that the Saddam regime knew of his presence or was providing him any support.

U.S. intelligence sources in fact downplay his importance to the al-Qaeda network; in February the New York Times quoted unnamed administration officials as saying many in the FBI and CIA were upset about the way Zarqawi's ties to Baghdad were being played up to bolster the case for war.

Meanwhile Colin Powell in his second speech to the United Nations Security Council called Zarqawi a "deadly terrorist."

He referred to "Al-Qaeda affiliates, [which] based in Baghdad, now coordinate the movement of people, money and supplies into and throughout Iraq for [Zarqawi's] network, and they've now been operating freely in the capital for more than eight months."

(left)

US occupying military helicopter shooting flares flies over the Iraq city of Baquba.

(right)

Protestors demonstrating against the war in Iraq and the Bush administration as they march through downtown Seattle Thursday, Oct. 5, 2006.

The protest was part of a national protest effort that saw demonstrations in many other cities across the United States.

Photos: AFP/POOL/Samir Mizban, AP/Ted S. Warren

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHIn his May 1 speech declaring victory in Iraq, Bush described Iraq as an "ally" of al-Qaeda.

Iraq "ally" of al-Qaeda

Fortunately more and more politicians and journalists say otherwise: "There was and is no evidence," declares Sen. Edward Kennedy, "that Saddam was conspiring with al-Qaeda."

And on the WMDs: "It appears," says John W. Dean, "that not only the Niger uranium hoax, but most everything else that Bush said about Saddam Hussein's weapons was false, fabricated, exaggerated, or phony."

The fact is sinking in: They lied to us.

How many people are now thinking: We were willing to support attacking Iraq as a way of getting even with the 9-11 terrorists, and to defend ourselves.

Turns out Iraq was no threat, and it's not connected to al-Qaeda anyway.

The people just want us out of their country, and we're losing another soldier every day trying to keep the peace, but we don't have enough troops in there, and the GIs hate it there and want to come home, the world doesn't want to help us because they opposed the war and don't agree with the occupation... Why do we have to be there anyway?

Donald Rumsfeld, under oath, explains the Iraq-al Qaeda connection

While hoping for the day when Donald Rumsfeld, under oath, explains whether he really believes in the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, I am in the meantime trying to grasp the flow of events involving this lesser if still pretty damning affair of the Niger letters, and understand it in context.

Baquba

caught in occupying US attack

Mosul

Occupying US forces

searching houses

(left)

Iraqi medics treat a wounded man at a hospital in the Iraq city of Baquba.

(right)

U.S. occupying soldiers illuminate their way inside a house using a M16 rifle lighter as they conduct a house-to-house search during a raid in the predominantly Sunni city of Mosul, 370km from Baghdad, in 2005.

Photos: AFP/Ali Yussef, AFP/Mauricio Lima

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHI
What follows is a chronology based upon numerous internet sources, indicating the key players who constructed the argument for war, and suggesting that several neocons in the Defense Department, Vice President's office, and the White House

According to some, the Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See (or to Italy) visited a number of African countries, including Niger, in 1999.

Others speak of an "Iraqi trade delegation" to Niger, which might be a confused reference to the ambassador's visit.

Thereafter Italian intelligence investigated the trip to insure that Iraq was not seeking enriched uranium from Niger.

(Given that Niger receives 65% of its export income from uranium ore, reference to that product might well have entered any talks about trade, formal or informal, between Niger and Iraq. But when Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program, up to 1991, it used Iraqi uranium.)

Burglars sought letterhead stationary and seals

In January 2001, someone broke into Niger's embassy in Rome, stealing some items of value and ransacking the office. Italian officials speculate that the burglars may have sought letterhead stationary and seals to forge documents.

Six months later, the Italian intelligence service SISME obtained a stack of official-looking documents from an African diplomat.

These included the Niger uranium letters.

According to some accounts, the Italians sent summaries of their content to London and Washington in the fall of 2002, but Rome denies that it acquired such letters during its investigation or passed any on to other countries.

Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba, who writes for the news weekly Panorama, said that she acquired the letters from a source in the Italian intelligence community and passed them to the U.S. embassy in October 2002.

Newsweek reports the ambassador "tossed them out, rather than send them to [CIA] analysts at Langley," but the Washington Post says that by October 19 copies had been distributed to intelligence officials.

Another report states that Britain's MI6 passed information about the letters (or copies) to Vice President Cheney's office.

(A congressional intelligence-committee staff member told Seymour Hersh that "the Brits" initially "placed more stock in them than we did.")

This would have been months before Burba's visit to the U.S. embassy; Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby told Time, "The Vice President heard about the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger in February 2002. As part of his regular intelligence briefing, the Vice President asked a question about the implication of the report."

We must assume the administration had knowledge of the documents by this time.

You have to halt the brutal violence

she tells the puppet government in Baghdad

? ? ?

Kevin Benderman

Resister

'There's this old country song that says you've got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything'

'I had to make a stand because I did not believe in war anymore.'

(left)

Rice, seen here on 04 October 2006.

You have to halt the brutal violence she tells the puppet government in Baghdad.

(right)

Army mechanic Sgt. Kevin Benderman enters a military courtroom for his court-martial trial in this Thursday, July 28, 2005, photo at Fort Stewart, Ga.

Kevin Benderman spent 13 months in a military prison after skipping his Army unit's year-long deployment to Iraq, a decision the former Fort Stewart mechanic says he doesn't regret.

'There's this old country song that says you've got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything,' says Benderman, recently released from prison at Fort Lewis, Wash.

'I had to make a stand because I did not believe in war anymore.'

Photos: AFP/Pedro Ugarte, AP/Stephen Morton

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHOne of the letters purports to document a deal in 2000 between Niger and Iraq whereby the former would supply 500 tons of uranium oxide.

Analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research raised questions at some point about the documents' authenticity.

Documents' gist: No evidence

By early 2002 U.S. Ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick was asked about Iraq-Niger uranium trade; she informed Washington that there was no basis to suspect any link.

Then Cheney's office decided to investigate the letters' substance.

Former U.S. ambassador to Gabon, Joseph C. Wilson (a man of exceptionally distinguished diplomatic career), was (in his words) "invited out to meet with a group of people at the CIA who were interested in this subject" and agreed to investigate the content of the documents, which he had not seen.

He left for Niger in February, and made an oral report in March.

"Although I did not file a written report," Wilson declares, "there should be at least four documents in U.S. government archives confirming my mission.

The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey [capital of Niger], a separate report written by the embassy staff, a CIA report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally)."

One must imagine that they came to Libby's attention.

The documents' gist is: there was no evidence that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Niger.

Meanwhile, during the same month, a four-star U.S. general, Marine Gen. Carlton W. Fulford Jr., deputy commander of the U-S European Command (the headquarters responsible for military relations with most of sub-Saharan Africa) also visited Niger at the request of the U.S. ambassador.

He met with Niger's president February 24 and emphasized the importance of tight controls over its uranium ore deposits.

According to MSNBC, he also visited the country two months later.

This year, Fulford told the Washington Post that he had come away convinced that Niger's uranium stocks were secure.

His report went to European Command Commander, General Joseph Ralston, who passed it along to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers.

The Post reports that "it is unclear whether they reached officials in the White House."

Bush at War, Part III

Intended to be explodednear the convoy ofIraq's industry minister

(left)

The cover of Bob Woodward's latest book titled 'State of Denial - Bush at War, Part III'

(right)

An Iraqi man evacuates a wounded girl from the site where at least nine people were killed and at least 75 wounded, including 15 commandos, in three large explosions outside a market complex in southern Baghdad.

A series of bombs intended to be exploded near the convoy of Iraq's industry minister, killed 12 people and wreaked havoc and destruction across a Baghdad neighborhood.

Photos: AFP/Paul J. Richards, AFP/Ali al-Saadi

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHAs of summer 2002, both Wilson and Fulford had reported that there was no evidence for Iraqi efforts to import uranium from Niger.

OFFICE OF SPECIAL PLANS

But that same summer, Secretary Rumsfeld established the Office of Special Plans, headed by Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, Undersecretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs William Luti, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

Its official purpose was to collect intelligence relating to terrorism and interpret it.

Its very establishment reflected the disappointment felt by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz over the CIA's "failure" to find sufficient dirt on Iraq.

They had asked for evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda link; instead, in May 2002 both the CIA and FBI reported that, despite an exhaustive search, no evidence had been found for such a connection.

Information from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress

So Rumsfeld instructed the new OSP "to search for information on Iraq's hostile intentions or links to terrorists" that might have been overlooked by the CIA.

It received in particular much information from Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, a group held in contempt by the State Department but favored by the Defense Department neocons.

(Simultaneously, in Israel, Ariel Sharon created a similar committee outside the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad; this organization was in close touch with Rumsfeld's operation.)

The OSP was designed to justify an attack on Iraq.

Patrick Lang, former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the New Yorker the OSP "started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the President.

An elderly woman cries after she was rescued from an apartment building damaged by a roadside bomb in Baghdad, October 2, 2006.

A series of bombs intended to be exploded near the convoy of Iraq's industry minister, killed 12 people and wreaked havoc and destruction across a Baghdad neighborhood.

(right)

Darrell Anderson (C) stands with his wife Gail Greer (R), his mother Anita Anderson (L) and his stepfather Steve Dennis during a news conference at the Colvin Community Center in Radcliff, Kentucky, October 3, 2006.

Darrell Anderson is a US resister who deserted from the United States military after being given a purple heart for protecting another soldier in Iraq.

He has returned to the US to be more vocal in his protest of the war and is due to return to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to face the US military machine after spending two years in Canada.

Photos: Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud/Reuters, John Sommers II/Reuters

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHThe agency was quietly disbanded in March, on the eve of the war, its (very special) mission accomplished.

The Defense Department, committed to war, was willing to ignore intelligence that conflicted with war preparations and to shrewdly deploy disinformation to promote support for an attack.
Cheney made frequent trips to CIA offices

So too was the Vice President's office.

Having received Wilson's report, Cheney made frequent trips to CIA offices to help shape the intelligence to favor war with Iraq.

Meanwhile the Vice President became the leading proponent of the view that Iraq was a growing nuclear threat to the U.S. and its allies: "now we know," he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August 2002, "Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons" (The Guardian, 8/27/02) [emphasis added].

On September 24, the British government published a white paper that made use of the Niger uranium connection discredited by Wilson and Fulford months earlier.

It stated that Iraq "had recently 'sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.'"

The mass media accepted the report; the London Guardian headlined: "African gangs offer route to uranium."

The still-skeptical CIA contacted the British, questioning the intelligence and suggesting the passage be dropped from the report.

(The British have since stated that their assertion rests on intelligence aside from the discredited letters, but they have not provided any details.)

But the Office for Special Plans wanted to exploit the specter of Iraqi nuclear attack for all it was worth.

Thus the Niger report was included in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a key intelligence document to which only the president and a handful of other officials are privy.

This document noted that there were different interpretations of the significance of the Niger documents, and that the State Department regarded them as "highly dubious," but it implicitly recommended reference to an African uranium link as part of a case for war.

"Facing clear evidence of peril," Bush boomed

Meanwhile, top-ranking government spokespersons continued to warn of Iraqi nukes.

In September National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice told CNN, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and the next month Bush exploited the same image in Cincinnati.

"Facing clear evidence of peril," he boomed, "we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sept. 26, also cited Iraq's attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions.

By this time the Office of Special Plans was steering the dissemination of (dis)information about Iraq, but meeting with some State Department and CIA resistance.

While warning the British about the Niger letters, the CIA (George Tenet in particular) also urged that references to efforts by Iraq to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger be dropped from Bush's Cincinnati speech.

Rice aide and deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley in fact jettisoned them, after two memos and a phone call from Tenet.

Occupying US soldier

searches through their house

in eastern Baghdad

Darrell Anderson and fellow

US resisters

(left)

An occupying U.S. soldier from Alfa company 1-17 IN regiment of the 172nd brigade searches through their house in eastern Baghdad, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2006.

(right)

Darrell Anderson (C) speaks during a news conference at the Colvin Community Center in Radcliff, Kentucky, October 3, 2006.

Darrell Anderson is a US resister who deserted from the United States military after being given a purple heart for protecting another soldier in Iraq.

He has returned to the US to be more vocal in his protest of the war and is due to return to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to face the US military machine after spending two years in Canada.

Photos: AP/Darko Bandic, John Sommers II/Reuters

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHWhy is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement

But top-ranking officials' references to Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa continued.

A publicly circulated State Department "fact sheet" released December 19 mentioned Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Niger, and asked rhetorically, "Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?"

(Both Iraq and Niger denied any procurement.)

The charge was included in the President's Daily Brief (P.D.B.), seen by the President and only a few other senior officials.

On January 23, Rice wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times ("Why We Know Iraq is Lying") charging that, "Iraq has a high-level political commitment to maintain and conceal its weapons.

For example, [Iraq's] declaration [on its weapons programs] fails to account for or explain Iraq's efforts to get uranium from abroad, its manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles it claims not to have, and the gaps previously identified by the United Nations in Iraq's accounting for more than two tons of the raw materials needed to produce thousands of gallons of anthrax and other biological weapons"

In December, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) requested from the State Department copies of the Niger letters.

They were not handed over until February.

AFRICAN URANIUM AND THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS

Throughout this period, the Office of Special Plans seems to have enjoyed the upper hand, although it skirmished with the State Department and CIA from time to time over the utility of specific intelligence.

The key exchange occurred just before President Bush delivered his State of the Union speech January 28, when one Robert G. Joseph, director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council, asked Alan Foley, a C.I.A. expert on weapons of mass destruction, whether the president's address could include a reference to Iraq's seeking uranium from Niger.

Foley recommended that the reference be removed, since the intelligence was of uncertain credibility.

Joseph then asked if it would be accurate to cite the British white paper as the source of the information.

Foley replied that the CIA had actually informed British intelligence that it doubted the Niger materials, but he apparently agreed that it would be technically accurate to say that the British had a report that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Africa.

Hence the infamous line in the January 28 address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.''

(The quality of British intelligence came under scrutiny when, in early February, 10 Downing Street issued the paper, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation."

The article was supposedly based on high-level British intelligence, but at least 11 of the 16 pages were lifted, verbatim, from two articles published in the September 2002 edition of Middle East Review of International Affairs, an Israeli journal.)

When Colin Powell made his presentation to the UN February 5, he dropped the African uranium reference entirely.

(He has explained recently that the story "had not stood the test of time.")

Occupying US soldiers

search through their house

in eastern Baghdad

Darrell Anderson and fellow

US resister Joshua DeSpain

(left)

An occupying U.S. soldier from Alfa company 1-17 IN regiment of the 172nd brigade prevents women and children from going to their father as other occupying soldiers search through their house in eastern Baghdad, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2006.

(right)

Darrell Anderson (L) talks to Joshua DeSpain (R), a fellow soldier resister who came back from Iraq to protest the war, at a news conference at the Colvin Community Center in Radcliff, Kentucky, October 3, 2006.

Darrell Anderson is a US resister who deserted from the United States military after being given a purple heart for protecting another soldier in Iraq.

He has returned to the US to be more vocal in his protest of the war and is due to return to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to face the US military machine after spending two years in Canada.

Photos: AP/Darko Bandic, John Sommers II/Reuters

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHA n inside job

Meanwhile the U.S., after months' delay, turned over copies of the Niger letters to the IAEA.

In March IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei announced they were indeed "not authentic," but rather childish forgeries.

"These documents are so bad," a senior IAEA official told the New Yorker, "that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking."

On March 17, Bush repeated that, "Iraq continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," and the next day, on "Meet the Press," Cheney reiterated: "We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Ray McGovern, former spook and member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, notes that "if you look at Cheney's speeches, he's way out ahead" in claiming Saddam has "a reconstituted nuclear capability."

But, McGovern adds, the vice president has "no evidence to support that."

As the ground war began, the mainstream press and some politicians had finally begun to raise the kinds of questions that the antiwar activists had been asking for months.

"There is a possibility that the fabrication of these [Niger] documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq," concluded Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.).

He wrote FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III March 21 requesting an investigation of the letters.

Meanwhile investigative journalism, largely stymied since 9-11, began to revive: on June 12, The Washington Post revealed that an unnamed ambassador had traveled to Niger and reported back that there was no Iraq-African uranium connection.

Soon Mr. Wilson identified himself through a New York Times op-ed piece (July 6), inveighing against the Bush administration for hyping the intelligence to support war with Iraq.

"Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war," he wrote, "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

He told "Meet the Press" that "Either the administration has information that it has not shared with the public or ... they were using the selective use of facts and intelligence to bolster a decision that had already been made to go to war."

Occupying US soldiers

search through a house

in eastern Baghdad

Darrell Anderson talks to

supporters before news conference

(left)

An occupying U.S. soldier from Alfa company 1-17 IN regiment of the 172nd brigade search through their Iraq people's house in eastern Baghdad, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2006.

(right)

Darrell Anderson (C) talks to supporters before a news conference at the Colvin Community Center in Radcliff, Kentucky, October 3, 2006.

Darrell Anderson is a US resister who deserted from the United States military after being given a purple heart for protecting another soldier in Iraq.

He has returned to the US to be more vocal in his protest of the war and is due to return to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to face the US military machine after spending two years in Canada.

Photos: AP/Darko Bandic, John Sommers II/Reuters

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHI raq seeking to contact officials in Niger about sales?

The backlash was immediate.

Ari Fleischer suggested that "Wilson's own report [shows] that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger about sales."

(According to Wilson, he mentioned only "an Algerian-Nigerien intermediary" who had asked about "commercial" sales, a query Niger had ignored.

"That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import a significant quantity of uranium as the President alleged?" asks Wilson.

"These guys really need to get serious.")

The White House "outed" Wilson's wife, who apparently had CIA ties and who, following her identification, was obliged to leave her post.

In any case, the White House was suddenly on the defensive.

On July 7, it admitted the obvious: "A senior Bush administration official said in a statement authorized by the White House" that "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech."

Immediately, journalists and politicians began to aggressively question the pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

(And to some extent, more importantly, the production and use of "intelligence" to generate support for the Iraq war.)

"This is a very important admission," Tom Daschle, Democratic leader in the Senate, declared.

"It's a recognition that we were provided with faulty information. And I think it's all the more reason why a full investigation of all the facts surrounding this situation be undertaken."

By the 10th the controversy was everywhere front-page news.

David S. Broder wrote in the Washington Post, "If President Bush is not reelected, we may look back on last Thursday, July 10, 2003, as the day the shadow of defeat first crossed his political horizon."

Anti war demonstrator Nadia McCaffrey holds up a photo of her son, U.S. Army Sgt. Patrick Ryan McCaffrey, during a rally outside of a fundraising campaign breakfast for Rep. Richard Pombo (D-Tracy) with President Bush in Stockton, Calif., on Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2006.

(right)

Darrell Anderson as he walks with his wife Gail Greer after a news conference at the Colivn Community Center in Radcliff, Kentucky, October 3, 2006.

Darrell Anderson is a US resister who deserted from the United States military after being given a purple heart for protecting another soldier in Iraq.

He has returned to the US to be more vocal in his protest of the war and is due to return to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to face the US military machine after spending two years in Canada.

Photos: AP/Paul Sakuma, John Sommers II/Reuters

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHPro-Israel Center for Security Policy

The House and Senate intelligence committees began closed-door hearings on pre-war intelligence.

On July 17, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Il.) told the press that the Senate hearing had so far discovered the identity of "the person was who was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from Africa."

The press has identified the individual as the above-mentioned Robert G. Joseph, a top aide to Condoleeza Rice, a Special Assistant to the President, and Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation and Homeland Defense.

He serves on the National Security Council, and is an adviser of the pro-Israel Center for Security Policy.

He coordinates nuclear non-proliferation policy on the NSC, while advocating "counter-proliferation" (the use of banned weapons as the pretext for war.)

Joseph has taught at Carleton College and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.A. from the University of Chicago.

He was a Professor of National Security Studies, and Director of the Center for Counterproliferation Research, at the National Defense University.

As noted above, Joseph had sought Alan Foley's approval of the wording of the uranium reference in the State of the Union speech.

"It is inconceivable," writes Robert Scheer, "that in reviewing draft after draft of the State of the Union speech, NSC staffers Hadley and Joseph failed to tell Rice that the president was about to spread a big lie to justify going to war."

They should both be questioned.

Hadley, after initially denying that the White House had received any caution from the CIA about the African uranium reference, has now taken responsibility for it, just as Tenet had earlier.

He says, "It is now clear to me that I failed in [the] responsibility" to delete the passage, and declares that he should have remembered that the CIA had objected to the story earlier.

"Had I done so, this would have avoided the whole current controversy" (Boston Globe, July 23).

But Bush's director of communications Dan Bartlett insists that the bogus Africa report the State of the Union address was "not at the specific request of anyone" but something "one of the speechwriters had come up with" after reviewing the intelligence.

The loved one was wounded in action between Iraq resistance fighters and US occupying soldiers.

(right)

US Marines in Iraq west of Kirkuk, July 2006.
At least 17 US soldiers have been killed around Iraq since Saturday, including eight in a single day in Baghdad, the occupying US military command announced October 3, 2006, saying the toll had brought a tragic day.

Photos: AP/Mohammed Adnan, AFP/Marwan Ibrahim

July 26, 2003

Faith-Based IntelligenceThe Office of Special Plans, the Niger Uranium Fraud and Neocon Arrogance

By GARY LEUPP

THE "FAITH-BASED" APPROACHH adley brings us to Condoleeza Rice and the White House.

But even more attention should go to Abram Shulsky and William Luti, leaders of the Defense Department's short-lived OSP, alongside Wolfowitz and Feith.

Shulsky, the program's director, received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1972, having (like Paul Wolfowitz who received his doctorate the same year) studied under Leo Strauss.

An expert on Strauss' thought, he got his start in politics working in Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson's office alongside Elliott Abrams in the 1970s.

He joined the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1980s and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan Administration.

Later he worked at RAND, where, along with other neocons, including I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby (now Cheney's chief of staff  a man who should be asked about the Wilson report).

Shulsky authored an essay entitled "From Containment to Global Leadership: America and the World after the Cold War."

This advocated preemptive war if necessary to insure U.S. global hegemony.

In 1999, he coauthored (with Gary Schmitt) an essay on "Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence," arguing that deception is among the most vital tools in diplomacy and intelligence.

(A former CIA official, quoted by Seymour Hersh in a NYT article, described the Shulsky group as "outsiders" in the intelligence community, having "a high degree of paranoia.

They've convinced themselves that they're on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.")

A key element of Strauss's thought is that "a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat.

Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured" (Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right, 1996).

One can legitimately raise the question; did Shulsky and other paranoid neo-cons manufacture the Iraqi WMD threat?

The Office of Special Plans was overseen by Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain, Operation Desert Storm fighter pilot, former Cheney adviser, early advocate of military action against Iraq, head of Pentagon's post-war Iraq planning group, and liaison after 9-11 to Iraqi exiles in Europe.

In a speech in Washington in October 2002, he advocated the U.S. adopt a policy of "anticipatory self-defense."

But in this case "self-defense" requiring deception for its justification generated opposition from professional intelligence operatives.

These were silenced.

Hersh quotes an unnamed Pentagon policy adviser:

"Shulsky and Luti won the policy debate.

They beat 'em-they cleaned up against State and the C.I.A.

There's no mystery why they won-because they were more effective in making their argument.

Luti is smarter than the opposition.

Wolfowitz is smarter.

They out-argued them.

It was a fair fight.

They persuaded the President of the need to make a new security policy.

The Bush administration will now attempt to refashion Iraq as a U.S. ally in the Arab world, "democratic" and globalized, friendly to Israel, dotted with U.S. bases, open to foreign ideas, institutions, and missionary efforts.

But the neocons' Achilles heel is arrogance.

They did not plan on the degree of Iraqi opposition, just as they did not anticipate the magnitude of the global antiwar movement in the months before the March attack.

They don't understand why the Germans, French and Indians, having opposed the war, aren't eager right now to help the U.S. impose its occupation.

Now, as what NBC News' Andrea Mitchell calls "a war between the White House National Security Council and the CIA" heats up, they might underestimate the intelligence community's indignation, and ability to reveal damning evidence about the neocons' manipulation of public opinion to support war.

"Well, we've liberated people from a dictator, right?"

That's what they want us to think.

"I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction," Paul Wolfowitz told a group of reporters traveling with him from Iraq last week. "I'm concerned about getting Iraq on its feet. I didn't come (to Iraq) on a search for weapons of mass destruction. If you could get in a relaxed conversation with Iraqis on that subject they'd say why on earth are you Americans fussing so much about this historical issue when we have real problems here, when Baathists are killing us and Baathists are threatening us and we don't have electricity and we don't have jobs. Those are the real issues. I'm not saying that getting to the bottom of this WMD issue isn't important. It is important. But it is not of immediate consequence." [emph. added]

Thus for Wolfowitz, "This historical issue" (of the justification for war, which he feverishly promoted) as opposed to the "real problems" (produced by that unjustified war) requires no further discussion.

Such arrogance.

He just can't understand why Americans would be outraged that he, having contributed to the apparent disinformation leading up to the Iraq war, would now openly acknowledge his lack of concern with WMDs, discourage "fussing so much about" their lack and and the lies surrounding them, which to him are merely "historical" rather than "real issues of immediate consequence."

Wolfowitz is so smug that he assumes he can tell a reporter that the WMDs weren't necessarily the main issue for attacking Iraq, and that the public will take it all in stride, happy to be (mis)led by the Straussian wise, those who make clever use of deception in intelligence and of manufactured external threats to stabilize the political order.

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because that was the one reason everyone could agree on," says Wolfowitz (Vanity Fair, July 2003).

Too hard to make the al-Qaeda link stick.

And the real reasons (geopolitical advantage; control of oil; Israel's security) not marketable.

So we decided, let's go with the WMDs, scare people, use the specter of another 9-11  only with an Iraqi nuke  and see if we can get 60-70% support for an attack.

Doesn't that make beautiful sense?

People are supposed to be cool with that, three months after "victory," as Iraq is looking like a quagmire?

Richard Perle, when asked by reporters in Moscow July 22 about the absence of WMDs, said, "There were of course many reasons for starting the war in Iraq," but implied that Iraqi liberation was the most important.

"We are clearly starting to see that up to 300,000 people were killed and buried" by Saddam's regime, he declared.

He is "absolutely certain" that weapons of mass destruction are hidden in Iraq, but he admits, "We don't know where to look for them and we never did know where to look for them I hope this will take less than 200 years."

Does he imagine people will smile indulgently at his little joke?

Blair told Congress he's "confident that history will forgive" the decision to invade Iraq, even if the weapons search is fruitless.

Chances are the American people won't forgive, as the truth about an unjustifiable invasion comes out, the bills of occupation mount, the national reputation plummets, the body bags come home, and the "liberated" people of Iraq keep saying, "GO HOME!"

Gary Leupp is an an associate professor in the Department of History at Tufts University and coordinator of the Asian Studies Program.

Published on Friday, June 1, 2007 by Marjorie Cohn  Uruknet.info

The Unitary King George

As the nation focused on whether Congress would exercise its constitutional duty to cut funding for the war, Bush quietly issued an unconstitutional bombshell that went virtually unnoticed by the corporate media.

The directive throws them a bone by speaking of a "cooperative effort" among the three branches, "coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers."

The Vice-President would help to implement the plans.

Courtesy

"Comity," however, means courtesy, and the President would decide what kind of respect for the other two branches of government would be "proper."

This Presidential Directive is a blatant power grab by Bush to institutionalize "the unitary executive."

A seemingly innocuous phrase, the unitary executive theory actually represents a radical, ultra rightwing interpretation of the powers of the presidency.

Championed by the conservative Federalist Society, the unitary executive doctrine gathers all power in the hands of the President and insulates him from any oversight by the congressional or judicial branches.

Alito  not just some executive powers, but the executive power  the whole thing

In a November 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, then Judge Samuel Alito said the Constitution:

"...makes the president the head of the executive branch, but it does more than that.

The president has not just some executive powers, but the executive power  the whole thing."

These "unitarians" claim that all federal agencies, even those constitutionally created by Congress, are beholden to the Chief Executive, that is, the President.

This means that Bush could disband agencies like the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Reserve Board, etc., if they weren't to his liking.

Indeed, Bush signed an executive order stating that each federal agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee.

Consumer advocates were concerned that this directive was aimed at weakening the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Audacious presidential overreaching into the constitutional province

The unitary executive dogma represents audacious presidential overreaching into the constitutional province of the other two branches of government.

This doctrine took shape within the Bush administration shortly after 9/11.

On September 25, 2001, former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo used the words "unitary executive" in a memo he wrote for the White House:

"The centralization of authority in the president alone is particularly crucial in matters of national defense, war, and foreign policy, where a unitary executive can evaluate threats, consider policy choices, and mobilize national resources with a speed and energy that is far superior to any other branch."

Six weeks later, Bush began using that phrase in his signing statements.

Afghan Independent Radio, which broadcasts a program in Kandahar city, reports that missing children declarations are the most commonly placed adverts on the show.

"We get about four or five missing children a month. About 20 percent of them are found before we hit the air," said Ismael Tahir, director of radio programming at the station.

However, others are taken for child labour, or abuse, or are runaways, Tahir said, adding that the station is planning to log their names and addresses to help with investigations.

The radio station is at the front line of the search for missing children because public confidence in the police has sunk so low. Even the newly appointed police chief, Lieutenant General Mohammed Ayoub Salangi, concedes that there was probably official corruption behind the kidnappings.

"It seems as if local militia or tribal commanders were involved," he told AFP.

For Mohammed Tahir's family their nightmare had only just begun when they lost their son. Police arrested two of the child's uncles, keeping one of them, Abdul Zahir, for 18 days and torturing him to try and force him to admit to the crime.

"I couldn't admit it because I haven't done anything, but now our whole family wants to leave Kandahar because we think there were powerful people involved," he said.

No police investigators have been to look at the pictures the kidnappers sent to try to find out who might be behind the killings, he added.

"It should be possible to work out where this was developed and try to trace the kidnappers that way," he said holding out a picture of his dead nephew.

As of December 22, 2006, Bush had used the words "unitary executive" 145 times in his signing statements and executive orders.

Yoo, one of the chief architects of Bush's doctrine of unfettered executive power, wrote memoranda advising Bush that because he was commander in chief, he could make war any time he thought there was a threat, and he didn't have to comply with the Geneva Conventions.

In a 2005 debate with Notre Dame professor Doug Cassel, Yoo argued there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering that a young child of a suspect in custody be tortured, even by crushing the child's testicles.

The unitary executive theory has already cropped up in Supreme Court opinions.

Structural advantages of unitary Executive

In his lone dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice Clarence Thomas cited "the structural advantages of a unitary Executive."

He disagreed with the Court that due process demands an American citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision maker.

Thomas wrote:

"Congress, to be sure, has a substantial and essential role in both foreign affairs and national security.

But it is crucial to recognize that judicial interference in these domains destroys the purpose of vesting primary responsibility in a unitary Executive."

One wonders what Bush & Co. are setting up with the new Presidential Directive.

What if, heaven forbid, some sort of catastrophic event were to occur just before the 2008 election?

Bush could use this directive to suspend the election.

This administration has gone to great lengths to remain in Iraq.

It has built huge permanent military bases and pushed to privatize Iraq's oil.

Bush and Cheney may be unwilling to relinquish power to a successor administration.

Marjorie Cohn, MWC News Magazine senior editor, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists.

Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be (is) published by PoliPointPress.

(left)

Photo from Australian broadcaster SBS TV shows a hooded prisoner being tortured at Iraq Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2004.

(right)

SBS TV shows a hooded and bound prisoner being attacked by a dog in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, during interrogation by US soldiers.

Published on Monday, July 4, 2005 by CommonDreams.orgby Sheldon Drobny

Justice O'Connor's decision in Bush v. Gore led to the current Bush administration's execution of war crimes and atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places in the Middle East that are as egregious as those committed by the Third Reich and other evil governments in human history.

The lesson is clear.

Those people who may be honorable and distinguished in their chosen profession should always make decisions based upon good rather than evil no matter where their nominal allegiances may rest.

Justice O'Connor was quoted to have said something to the affect that she abhorred the thought of Bush losing the 2000 election to Gore.

She was known to have wanted to retire after the 2000 election for same reason she is now retiring.

She wanted to spend more time with her sick husband.

Unfortunately, she tarnished her distinguished career with the deciding vote in Bush v. Gore by going along with the partisan majority of the Court to interfere with a democratic election that she and the majority feared would be lost in an honest recount.

She dishonored herself and the Supreme Court by succumbing to party allegiances and not The Constitution to which she swore to uphold.

And the constitutional argument she and the majority used to justify their decision was the Equal Protection Clause.

The Equal Protection Clause was the ultimate basis for the decision, but the majority essentially admitted (what was obvious in any event) that it was not basing its conclusion on any general view of what equal protection requires.

The decision in Bush v Gore was not dictated by the law in any senseeither the law found through research, or the law as reflected in the kind of intuitive sense that comes from immersion in the legal culture.

The Equal Protection clause is generally used in matters concerning civil rights.

There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is absolute nonsense.

In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist.

The greatest threat to Israel's right to exist, with the prospect of devastating violence, now comes from Iran.

For too long, leaders of both political parties in the United States have not done nearly enough to confront the Russians and the Chinese, who have supplied Iran as it has plowed ahead with its nuclear and missile technology....

In the words of Isaiah, we will make ourselves to Israel 'as hiding places from the winds and shelters from the tempests; as rivers of water in dry places; as shadows of a great rock in a weary land.'